43. Question Time: Margaret Thatcher, Rupert Murdoch, and Mick Lynch

At what points in their political careers did Rory and Alastair feel under the most pressure? Plus the wonders of sleep, Murdoch's subtle influence, and protest marches. Blackpool tickets - Saturday 8th October: wintergardensblackpool.co.uk/events/the-rest-is-politics-live/ Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @RestIsPolitics Email: [email protected] Producer: Dom Johnson Exec Producer: Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Rory Stewart?

  This episode is brought to you by NordVPN.

• 0:06Alastair Campbell?

  And I must thank NordVPN because on my Grand European Tour with Fiona, I was away from the Hawthorns for West Bromwich against Burnley, but I managed to watch it. There you go.

• 0:19Rory Stewart?

  I actually had a NordVPN thank you. I was in the new Starbucks here in Crete. And of course, the thing flashed up, saying this is an unsecured public network. And I was able to go to my VPN. It was a little reminder of something we often forget when we're in all those cafes and things, which is actually genuinely, people can do all kinds of weird cyber attacks and spying if you don't have a virtual private network when you're sitting in that Starbucks.

• 0:42Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I think, are you not really sort of proud of me that I managed to do this? Or should I say Fiona managed to do this?

• 0:49Rory Stewart?

  I'm incredibly proud of you. That's a tech transformation. So to get the best discount off your NordVPN plan, go to nordvpn.com/restispolitics. That's nordvpn.com/restispolitics. And the link is in the episode description.

• 1:05Speaker 02

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• 1:44Rory Stewart?

  Welcome to the Rest is Politics Question Time with me, Rory Stewart.

• 1:49Alastair Campbell?

  And me, Alastair Campbell.

• 1:50Rory Stewart?

  So, Alistair, question, were you up bright and early this morning on your bicycle? Because we got a great question regarding sleep from Sarah Moore. How much sleep do you both get? How much do you generally need? I think we'd be a better society if we got more sleep.

• 2:06Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, well, I agree with the last part totally. Um, I, I love sleep. Um, I regularly go to bed before ten. Um, I used to see sleep as a complete waste of time. In fact, I don't know if Jordy Gregg, ex editor of The Mail, uh, fellow former Old Etonian, or you've, no, you can't be a former Old Etonian, you are just an Old Etonian. Jordy Gregg, uh, used to work for me when I was on the way to a nervous breakdown in nineteen eighty six. And I once called him into my office and I said, Jordy, I don't know how much you're sleeping, but just listen to me. Sleep is a waste of your time and mine. So I suggest you do less of it.

• 2:47Rory Stewart?

  Shortly before, shortly before you went mad.

• 2:49Alastair Campbell?

  Shortly before I went completely off the rails. So, but now I, I absolutely think, I see sleep, diet and exercise as the three most important things.

• 2:58Rory Stewart?

  How much, how much do you aim to sleep a night then?

• 3:00Alastair Campbell?

  Uh, I like to s- minimum seven and if, if possible, more.

• 3:05Rory Stewart?

  So I know you're obsessed with my rings and on my finger, I've got this thing called an aura ring and the aura ring tells me how I sleep every night. It does my, uh, pulse rate, it does my heart intervals, it does the length, it does deep sleep, it does light sleep. And it's been a really good at sleep training me. Um, and anyone interested in books, fantastic book by Matthew Walker.

• 3:28Alastair Campbell?

  How we sleep, why we sleep.

• 3:30Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, really, really good. And, and one of the things he points out there is that although people believe that you, different humans need to sleep different times, his basic argument is they don't. We all need to sleep about eight hours and that's normal for our species. And that the idea that Mrs. Thatcher could get by on three and a half, four hours of sleep was complete nonsense.

• 3:51Alastair Campbell?

  I think that was probably a myth as well. I think, I don't know why politicians love to sort of say, oh, I don't need much sleep. I don't think people respect them for it. Um, so, and, and I'm not, I'm not convinced that she only needed four hours of sleep. Now, Rory, you, you did point out that yesterday's, um, podcast was, was, was pretty down, uh, and heavy, lots of sort of, you know, sewage and civil war and all sorts of stuff going on. So I think my first question, if I may, it's not even a question, it's just somebody called Steve Allen.

• 4:20Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 4:20Alastair Campbell?

  Who wants to tell us the story that on holiday, his daughter lost her school books in a hotel.

• 4:27Rory Stewart?

  Yes.

• 4:28Alastair Campbell?

  She and her mum looked absolutely everywhere for them and Steve.

• 4:34Alastair Campbell?

  Asked himself, what would Rory do? And he went to where they had last been with the books and he found them.

• 4:43Rory Stewart?

  Oh, that's so good. I'm so, I'm so moved by it. I genuinely think this is going to be my contribution to, to, to world humanity. I think this could be the thing on my gravestone.

• 4:52Alastair Campbell?

  And the other one, the other one I want to start, the other, the other one, Mary Pole Baker, you quoted an 80 year old last week.

• 4:59Rory Stewart?

  Yep.

• 4:59Alastair Campbell?

  She says, and we should ask her, answer her question, but we should also just welcome the fact that she introduces herself as, I'm an 85 year old, recent follower of your brilliant podcast. And I'd like to ask your view of the UK's world status in 10 years' time, assuming we last that long. Now, Mary, I don't know where you live, but I just think, because I'm a bit of a sucker for people who start off by saying, I'm an 85 year old, recent follower, et cetera. If you live within travelling distance of Blackpool, and you want to go to our live show on October the 8th, then please do get in touch through therestispolitics.com. How's that? And then now Rory, I think you should answer her question about where you think we'll be as a country in 10 years' time.

• 5:45Rory Stewart?

  Well, um, I think that we haven't got to terms with the fact that our population is aging. So we're in a situation where we have far more old people in relation to young people than we used to. And that is likely to get worse if we continue to clamp down on immigration. We've not managed to crack productivity. I can't really see any thoughtful, long-term economic or energy policy. So I'm afraid what we are likely to do is end up in a world in which our economy isn't really growing. We're going to feel poorer. Society is going to feel more unequal.

• 6:27Rory Stewart?

  And we are going to feel weaker internationally. So that's a really depressing vision. And I hope I am wrong and somebody can quote that back to me, maybe one of your dynamic young people in 10 years' time and say, that proves why I should never have been a politician, because I failed to see the great future.

• 6:44Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, I mean, it obviously does depend what happens over the next 10 years, but I don't think there's, look, one of the reasons I've always been so worried about Brexit is I think it is one of those moments where a country has decided to choose its own decline. And that, you know, at a time when the challenges that we face are going to be, require us to be stronger as a country, I think we're making ourselves weaker. So, Mary, I hope that hasn't depressed you too much. And I also hope that next week, we have a 90 year old, we go up five years by five years. Listen, here's a great question from R S Archer, Rory.

• 7:16Rory Stewart?

  Go on then.

• 7:17Alastair Campbell?

  And honestly, I've been thinking about this all week. Would Margaret Thatcher be electable as the Tory leader by the current Conservative Party?

• 7:28Rory Stewart?

  Gosh.

• 7:30Alastair Campbell?

  I just think that even for that question to be asked.

• 7:33Rory Stewart?

  That's a really interesting question, isn't it? I mean, I think it's important to understand how radical she was. And of course, she wasn't elected by the party. I mean, the point about a parliamentary system is that the MPs choose people. We've created this very weird system of letting party members vote, which means that we've created a hybrid between a kind of presidential primary and a parliamentary system. So it was really strange that she came through in the 1970s. The Conservative Party in those days was dominated by the figure of Willie Whitehall, who was seen as the favourite who was likely to come through. And Mrs Thatcher had not had one of the inverted commas, great officers of state. She'd been Education Secretary. She appeared to have, as far as anyone could tell, these very radical

• 8:14Rory Stewart?

  economic views, which were not at all in keeping with most of the ways that Conservative MPs thought at the time. She represented a fringe within the Conservative Party, and I think probably a fringe within the country as a whole. So I I I'm not sure, I I don't quite know actually how she made it through even then. I think in a sense it was luck because Willie Whiteall decided to remain loyal to Ted Heath and therefore didn't move against her and she managed to develop so much momentum as an early mover that she was almost unstoppable.

• 8:42Alastair Campbell?

  But but also if you think that as as Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher was seen as very right wing, but you know, on all sorts of positions now, I would put Sunak and Truss to the right of Margaret Thatcher. I think that's the point that the question is making, at least on on Europe. There's another one, this this one I'm very keen to answer.

• 9:00Rory Stewart?

  Done.

• 9:01Alastair Campbell?

  Um, from somebody called Rose Sambo. What benefits do unions like the RMT think they have had since we left the European Union, something which they backed? And I'm going to rely here on um, a very, very good friend of mine who got, I think, a bit pissed off when he heard Mick Lynch saying on the radio that one of the reasons the RMT backed Brexit is because the railways couldn't be nationalised if we were inside the EU because of something called the called the Fourth EU Railways Package. And the close friend who got in touch to say this was absolute bollocks is none other than the former European Transport Commissioner Neil Kinnock, uh, who said, if you get the

• 9:46Alastair Campbell?

  chance, can you point out that the EU law does not specify ownership, but it does outlaw unfair subsidy that distorts competition, which is why taxpayers no longer subsidise flag carrier airlines, but do support several national railways. And EU law separates infrastructure and operations management and accounting to prevent internal unfair subsidies, but both can be in public ownership.

• 10:14Rory Stewart?

  So that's that's so that's very interesting. So let's just sort of get to this because I know you're a great admirer of Mick Lynch.

• 10:20Alastair Campbell?

  I'm an admirer of his communication style.

• 10:22Rory Stewart?

  I mean, why on earth did he back Brexit? What on earth's going on there?

• 10:26Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, I think I think it's part of the the the the lexit. It's the same, you know, Jeremy Corbyn was against the European Union because he saw it as a kind of left, a right wing business conspiracies, it were. And I think that they they, I mean, look, the RMT put out some very, very, very anti European Union stuff during the referendum campaign. But that is when he was challenged about it on the radio, this is what Neil was telling me. That is the argument he gave, that you couldn't nationalise the railways inside the European Union. And Neil Kenner, who knows a thing or two about European transport law, is saying that's nonsense. Now, what I like about Mick Lynch is the fact, I think he's a very, very good communicator. And I like the fact that he just sits there and stands up to some of these journalists

• 11:11Alastair Campbell?

  who think that they're really brilliant, tough questioners, and he just takes them on. I like that.

• 11:15Rory Stewart?

  It's fascinating, isn't it? And you see how vulnerable the journalists are when they do that, because they've got a bit of hurried briefing before they go on. They've probably rushed it. And they've got a general sense that he's a bit of a lefty, and he's not being honest about that. But every time they try to pin him on that, it turns out they've got it wrong. So he just sort of sits there and looks at them and he says, no, I'm not a communist. That's complete nonsense. And they don't really know where to go next.

• 11:39Alastair Campbell?

  What I think he's good at, and this is something I try to do when I'm being interviewed, is most interviewers take too long to ask the question. And while they're asking the question, you can you can work out the kind of subtext, you can work out where they're trying to take it. And I think he's very, very good at that. If I was interviewing Mick Lynch, I'd be asking very, very short questions like, why did you back Brexit? Okay, off to the break.

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• 13:32Speaker 09

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• 14:02Rory Stewart?

  Here's Stephen Clark's question for you. What was the first protest march you went on? And do you think protest marches have any significant political impact?

• 14:10Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, God, probably, um, probably anti-apartheid. I remember going to a thing at Leicester Tigers, a rugby game. I think, I think I've got a vague memory that Peter Hain disrupted it.

• 14:28Alastair Campbell?

  And the question, do they have a, I think they do have a role. I think if you go back through the big historic changes, um, there's always been a kind of protest movement, marching and so forth. And one worry I have about the modern age is that too many people think that tweeting is protesting. Now, you can tweet a protest, you can tweet your protest and your opposition to something. But I actually think that one of the lessons, for example, from Greta Thunberg is that she doesn't just tweet. She goes, she goes places, she stands places, she says things, she takes a stand. So I think, I think marches. You know, and I sometimes wonder on the People's Vote campaign, we've got two of the biggest marches in recent history. And I sort of think, you know, where's everybody

• 15:13Alastair Campbell?

  gone? So I think we should, we should get our marching boots back on for all sorts of causes, not least the fact that, you know, we've got this terrible government.

• 15:22Rory Stewart?

  My first protest march, I think, was protesting your friend Bill Clinton when he turned up to speak at the Oxford Union. I was there waving placards, I guess.

• 15:32Alastair Campbell?

  Why? What were you, what were you?

• 15:33Rory Stewart?

  Ninety-two, I think we were accusing him of bombing a factory in Sudan, having innocent blood on his hands. Do you remember he'd, in order to distract from Monica Lewinsky, he decided to wipe out a soap factory, claiming that it was connected to Al Qaeda.

• 15:48Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm. James Pellington posted a picture of himself on Twitter and said, I'm walking on my own, coast to coast, with only, the rest is politics for company.

• 16:02Rory Stewart?

  Oh, my Lord, poor man.

• 16:05Alastair Campbell?

  Rory, that's not the way to promote the podcast. That must be lies. He then asked the question, Rory, he asked the question, what in our opinion is the most beautiful part of the United Kingdom?

• 16:18Rory Stewart?

  Well, for me, I think many, many different answers to this, but most beautiful bit of Scotland, I think, has to be the Western Isles. And the most beautiful bit of England, I think, has to be the Lake District, and particularly the farmed areas of the Lake District. I love small family farms. I love the glitter and the mica in the dry stone walls. I love the patchwork of different types of pasture and the contrast between the pastured lowland and the wilderness, the wild upland. Over to you. What's your favourite bit?

• 16:49Alastair Campbell?

  I'm going, these are both very, very personal, but one is Glencoe, and not because of the massacre. I just think it's

• 16:57Rory Stewart?

  I can't believe you're chasing Glenn Coe.

• 16:59Alastair Campbell?

  I do, I think Glenn Coe is just sort of

• 17:01Rory Stewart?

  This is a sinister, sinister thing, limey.

• 17:04Alastair Campbell?

  I mean, my heart stirs every time I'm there. And it's, and also it's the journey up towards it as well, but uh, that, and then the second one is also very personal. It's the view over the, the, the Burnley, Roy, there are two, there's a big stand. The James Hargreaves, now I normally sit in the Bob Lord, but when I do the commentary, if I do the commentary at the top of the, the James Hargreaves stand, you can see across the top of the Bob Lord stand onto the most beautiful countryside around Burnley. So I'm going for those two.

• 17:36Rory Stewart?

  Oh, okay. Here's a, here's a

• 17:39Rory Stewart?

  here's a question which I'm going to really muck up. It comes from Elizabeth Arundel and she says, Alles te je connais, vous adorez la langue française. J'apprends le français actuellement. Je suis intéressé à écouter des actualités politiques et podcasts en français. Quel est votre préféré? Qu'est-ce que vous recommandez?

• 18:01Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I'd say your accent was quite good, Roy, but you didn't correct her, I think, six grammatical errors.

• 18:08Rory Stewart?

  I, I was reading what she wrote. I was waiting for you to, I was waiting for you to correct the grammatic errors. I wasn't sure about, I wasn't sure about actually the use of actuellement as well.

• 18:17Alastair Campbell?

  Uh, le français, you, you'd probably say en ce moment, but you can say that. Um, I, the best, you see, I don't, I listen to German podcasts. So I think that Fiona listens to something called Slow News.

• 18:31Rory Stewart?

  Okay.

• 18:31Alastair Campbell?

  Um, which gives you the news in, uh, it's sort of, it simulates news from all our different French media outlets. I don't know Elizabeth, whether you're interested in sport, but there is a very, very good French football podcast, which I think is called France Football, Football in, um, unoriginally enough. Um, but I'd be much, much stronger with you on, on German podcasts.

• 18:54Rory Stewart?

  Give us a German one then.

• 18:55Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I, um, I used to be absolutely hooked on Frankfurter Algemeinerzeitung.

• 19:02Alastair Campbell?

  And they had this, it goes back to the point I was making about Mick Lynch, they have a journalist called Tammy Holder Reed, who used to do the FAZ and she now does Süddeutsche Zeitung, and she just asks very, very good, simple, short questions. She's normally interviewing journalists about stories that they've written. So it's not sort of, you know, hostile and provocative, but she's just very, very good at assimilating information and getting people to give information. And the other one, again, for football fans, there's a podcast called Phrasenmäher, which means phrase mower. It's a very odd title for a podcast, but it's basically in-depth interviews with German football greats.

• 19:42Rory Stewart?

  Ah, now, Alex Nisbet, something of an urban myth that many journalists writing for right-wing tabloids and don't privately believe many of the views they put in writing. Can you confirm if there's any truth to this? If so, is this an industry-wide phenomenon? So, Alex, to what, let's sort of get out of Alex's question to sort of broader question. What does it really mean to ask whether a journalist really believes what they're writing? How do you get the balance between them being provocative, entertaining, catching the eye of the editor, and whether it's something that in the cold light of day, if you really quiz them, they really believed or not?

• 20:21Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, I mean, I think that, look, let's just take one newspaper at the moment, the Daily Express. The journalists are going on strike, okay? Why are they going on strike? Because they're not very well paid, not very well treated, and because they presumably believe that organised collective action might have some effect. What does the Daily Express news agenda, what is their coverage of trade unions been in the Tory leadership contest? Truss and Sunak both vying to take on the unions. I know people at the Daily Express who are members of the Labour Party. And now I look, I know a guy at the Daily Mail, worked for years at the Daily Mail, who was a member of the Labour Party, and I used to say to him, how can you churn out this shit day after day after day after day?

• 21:05Alastair Campbell?

  And their answer was almost always, I've got a mortgage and I've got kids. So I think there is a lot of that. I think that I

• 21:11Rory Stewart?

  It's a bit like my colleagues. I had a, I mean, it's a horrible thing, but I remember challenging one of my colleagues saying, why on earth are you remaining in Boris Johnson's cabinet? And the answer was, I've got a mortgage and I've got kids and I can't afford to leave.

• 21:22Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm. And the thing is that, that, look, I think there's, I don't think there's anything wrong with journalists having strong opinions. What I can't stand are the ones who pretend to be kind of standing above the fray, objective. It's just an analysis. And look, I can remember, again, I wrote about this in my diaries when we went famously went to Australia to Tony Blair in opposition to speak to Rupert Murdoch's editors from all around the world. And I can remember at dinner and Murdoch was sitting there and it wasn't that he said to the editors, this is the line on this. It was that they knew and that they, they were looking constantly for his signals as to what the politics were.

• 22:03Rory Stewart?

  So you, you, you know, Murdoch much, much better than I do, but I, my encounter with him back in the day, before I became an MP, I sat next to him at dinner in New York. And I was as usual ranting about everything that I thought was wrong in the Afghan war. And already then he was quite an old man. I guess he was in his eighties. And I was very struck by the fact that unlike most very rich, powerful people in their eighties, he didn't talk very much. He listened a lot.

• 22:28Alastair Campbell?

  No, he didn't talk at all.

• 22:29Rory Stewart?

  The end of the evening, he said, can I come pick you up in a car tomorrow morning? I'd like you to take you down to the Wall Street Journal. So he drove me down to the Wall Street Journal and put me in front of his editors and said, Rory, I'd like you to repeat to them what you just said about Afghanistan. And I was very interested in this because I wasn't expecting that from Rupert Murdoch. And my, my conclusion from him is there's obviously a lot that is deeply, deeply disturbing about what he does. But there was also a sense that I got from that, that at some level he's a newsman.

• 22:57Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, yeah. Oh, there's no doubt about that. There's no doubt about that. And, but I, but I think that he, he probably broadly agreed with what he was saying. Or he was having an internal argument and he felt that what you were saying would lend weight to what he was arguing. I think he does use people like that. But I can remember that in particular, that, that time, I, I literally just said, you know, I was kind of making small talk, but I said, this speech that Tony's making to worry, you know, we've probably put more work into this speech, not least because we've just had 24 hours on a plane than we've done to any, any speech since he became leader. A couple of the editors arrived, I think it was the Sun and the Times. And based on what I'd said to him, he just sort of said to them, this is a big speech Tony Blair's making tomorrow.

• 23:43Alastair Campbell?

  And they went off, they went off and came back and they told him, we're saving, you know, I don't know. Page and a half, we're going to do editorial. They didn't know the content because I hadn't shown it to them.

• 23:54Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 23:54Alastair Campbell?

  And that was, that was them just picking up a signal.

• 23:59Rory Stewart?

  So we had a question here about books. Wayne Chadbourne, what are you both reading at the moment? What have you read recently that you'd recommend? You got anything on that?

• 24:08Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, well, again, I, I'd have to, well, I'm going to park the German. Okay, I'm currently reading.

• 24:14Rory Stewart?

  Yep.

• 24:15Alastair Campbell?

  A book by a former British diplomat called John Ramsden. And it's called The Poet's Esopostrophe Guide to Economics. And it's about Coleridge, Swift, Defoe, goes back through all these different poets and their views on the economy. And essentially says that they're a lot cleverer than most of the economists we have now.

• 24:39Rory Stewart?

  That's unacknowledged legislators of mankind, they call me. And I've been reading a lot of books on poverty. And our moral obligation to the poor. So great, Peter Singer, very, very distinguished ethical philosopher. Great book, Famine, Affluence and Morality. There's this very interesting movement run actually a lot out of Oxford.

• 25:02Rory Stewart?

  Guy called Toby Ord, who's written a book called The Precipice, Wilmer Gaskill, just produced a new book that I'd like maybe to talk about next week. On how we can think about our obligations towards the poor. And finally, a book by Nobel Prize winner Abhijit Banerjee called Poor Economics.

• 25:17Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 25:18Rory Stewart?

  So anyone interested in this, those are my little recommendations for the week.

• 25:22Alastair Campbell?

  That's good. That's good. Now, look, Max Abdul Ghani.

• 25:27Rory Stewart?

  Yep.

• 25:28Alastair Campbell?

  Asking us both, and I'm going to ask you to go first while I think about it. Give an example of when you felt a really heavy burden of responsibility in political life and how you dealt with it.

• 25:41Rory Stewart?

  I think probably the biggest and most difficult was when I was running for the leadership, because there was a moment when I was ahead in the national opinion polls and where it felt as though I could at least be in the last final two. I was within a few votes of getting into the final two against Boris Johnson. And so there was a chance, not a big chance, but there was a chance that I might be Prime Minister in seven weeks' time. And I guess that's what Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak are going through at the moment. And I remember being up half the night just thinking, goodness gracious me, I mean, am I really ready for this? And it made me think how strange our political system is, that

• 26:22Rory Stewart?

  it's not like the US where the presidents have these transition teams and have months to prepare to get in and they've built their whole executive team before they come in. And I suppose you had a bit more of that with Tony Blair, because he'd been the opposition leader for years before he came in to be Prime Minister. So you had the time to prepare. But but these short campaigns where you go from being a Cabinet Minister to a completely different job of being Prime Minister in a few weeks were my worst. How about you?

• 26:48Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, I've thought a lot about it since I read the question a few days ago. I think the time when I felt it almost physically, and certainly psychologically, was when I was giving evidence to the Hutton Inquiry, because I was conscious of the fact that if that went against us, it wasn't just the end for me, it was the end for Tony as well. And I really, really felt I had to be absolutely 100% on it and say the right thing in the right way, tell the truth and be convincing and be compelling. And I felt that very, very strongly. In fact, there's footage of me walking into the inquiry and I am so focused

• 27:33Alastair Campbell?

  that I'm barely aware of the fact that people are throwing things at me. There are people sort of hurling placards at me and shouting abuse at me. And honestly, I got to the door and Catherine Rimmer, who was working with me then and now works with Tony Blair, and she was virtually in, well, she was in tears because she'd seen me kind of running this gauntlet through these protesters. And I was barely aware of it because I was so focused. And so and I think I did, I really felt it then. And I think the other time I've thought about in that context was In relation to the Northern Ireland peace process, when you were conscious that just literally getting words out of place could have, if you weren't careful, have

• 28:14Alastair Campbell?

  an absolute catastrophic effect on things that were happening that would lead to either people being killed or people not being killed. So I think you, they're the two, they're the two things that popped into my head when I read Max's question.

• 28:26Rory Stewart?

  I'd, I'd, I'd love someday to, to see if we can find a, a thoughtful way into your experience of that happen inquiry in Iraq and everything, because obviously it's something of the, the back of people's minds, which had an incredibly deep psychological impact on you and defined the way in which you're perceived. And it would be interesting if we can find a moment, maybe in a future podcast, to reflect about how that works and how you look back at it. And, and get through the fact that I, I guess the problem for you is that you've been, and I guess Tony Blair too, been sort of asked the same question in a very aggressive way for 20 years, whether we can find another way in to think about it more thoughtfully.

• 29:09Alastair Campbell?

  Well, we sort of did that a little bit. When you, when you did your podcast series, when you were running for mayor, and you talked to me about that. And I don't know what you thought. I, I felt I was being pretty frank and open, but at the same time, it's hard to know. I find it genuinely hard to separate out my sense of belonging and ownership of what I've thought for so long and what I really think sometimes. I think it's very, very hard sometimes to, to separate those things out.

• 29:39Rory Stewart?

  Really difficult, isn't it? And, and the positions we take become so, particularly when we're, I find anyway, if it's something that I'm under real attack and scrutiny over, it becomes very, very difficult to detach and be objective. And I think that infects the whole of politics. I mean, I think it's one of the reasons why politicians end up being a bit brittle and not very self critical. And I think we're coming to our end now.

• 30:04Alastair Campbell?

  Well, listen, Rory, I've got a great last question.

• 30:06Rory Stewart?

  Go on then.

• 30:06Alastair Campbell?

  A great last, it's not, it's from Caroline Cronin. She says, I want to know, is it normal to love the Rest Is Politics intro theme? Or is it just me?

• 30:18Rory Stewart?

  Oh my goodness. Are you going to sing the intro theme for us this week?

• 30:21Alastair Campbell?

  It's quite, it's not really a singable thing. I can try and learn it on the back pipes, but. I quite like it as well. Caroline, I don't think you are alone. I think it's a nice catchy little podcast intro number.

• 30:33Rory Stewart?

  Let's, let's, let's, let's run with that. Let's get it to the top of the charts. Thank you guys very, very much and look forward to speaking next week.

• 30:39Alastair Campbell?

  Thanks. All the best.

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